January 15, 2001
DES MOINES, Iowa — In a victory for working people, workers at the ConAgra sausage processing plant in Omaha, Nebraska, voted to join the United Food and Commercial Workers union. This is the second union victory in a drive to organize some 4,000 workers in the city’s meatpacking industry.
The victory came 10 days after a highly publicized raid at Nebraska Beef by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, together with local and state police. The cops detained some 200 workers who they claimed were in the country illegally and marched them into buses. An organizing effort is underway at the plant and the UFCW protested the raid as a violation of labor law.
UFCW organizers say workers continue to get cards signed in the various plants and the organizing drive in Omaha might be the largest single packinghouse campaign in the past 20 years.
January 16, 1976
RALEIGH, N.C. — The protest of prisoners at the North Carolina Correctional Center for Women has entered a new stage with a lawsuit seeking $25 million in damages. The plaintiffs are thirty-six of the women who last June staged a peaceful demonstration on the prison grounds in protest of harassment and inhumane conditions of confinement. It was brutally quelled.
After the women began their protest, 450 male guards — armed with billy clubs, tear gas, pepper gas, dogs, and riot gear — were called in from Raleigh’s prison for men. This force was supplemented with 150 highway patrolmen and 50 city police.
Five days later, this army managed to subdue the women prisoners. “I cannot understand why they beat us, terrorize us. I do not know why a handful of women — naked, unarmed, behind bars — frighten them so much,” says a prisoner.
January 15, 1951
President Truman’s “State of the Union” ignored the popular demand that overshadows every other today: Stop the war now and withdraw the U.S. troops from Korea! He evaded entirely the fundamental constitutional issue: Shall a single man commit this country to war or engage armed forces on foreign soil wherever and whenever he sees fit?
Instead, he presented us with the appalling prospect of ever increasing preparations for “full war mobilization” and a “full-scale war.” He indicated a future of growing scarcity, higher prices, heavier taxes, frozen wages — the austerity of a garrison state.
Only the war profiteers got consolation from Truman’s message. The government must “practice rigid economy in its nondefense activities [read social welfare program].” Guns instead of butter for everyone — except the rich! The real “State of the Union.”